Music
Page 5

Whether you're into Bach, The Beatles or Bieber, whether you can play an instrument or humming is the height of your musical skill, music is a universal language that inspires, excites and brings joy to people of all walks of life. Technology can add a new spin to old favorites or lead to entirely new instruments with entirely new sounds. Whatever your jam, here's where you'll find the latest technological developments from the world of music.

​String pickers on the road often can't take their guitars of choice of their travels – due to size or safety concerns – so might carry or more portable flavor to help keep calluses from going soft. But what if you played a double bass? That's where the TravelBass comes into its own.​

​Amazon's Alexa voice assistant has made its way into many gadgets since it launched with the Echo smart speaker in 2014. Now music gear firm Roland has created its first Alexa Skill and loaded it into the Go:Piano so that players can chat as they play.​

​Earlier this month we had a look at some of the music gear highpoints of 2018. Though this showed that hardware and software innovation continues apace, there's nothing like a taste of oddness to serve as a reminder that gear makers can still think way outside of the box.​

The last year has seen iconic brand Gibson collapse and be reborn, Fender experiment with hybrid guitar forms, and Moog release its first analog polysynth in decades. It's been a rollercoaster of highs and lows, but we're focusing on the positive for a look back at music gear highlights in 2018.

​Modal Electronics launched an interesting monophonic synthesizer two years ago called the CRAFTsynth, followed by a polyphonic synth earlier this year. Now the company has gone monophonic again for the CRAFTsynth 2.0 wavetable synthesizer.​

Once you've attached your power brick, distortion and modulation stomps to your pedalboard, you may find that there's little or no space for a board tuner. Now there's a chromatic tuner from Pedaltrain called the SST that's designed to squeeze into the tiniest of gaps.​

​Music hardware maker Alesis has announced a new multi-tool for solo beatmakers, producers and kit-packing drummers. As well as performing electronic percussion duties, the Strike MultiPad can sample, edit and loop sounds and be used as an audio interface.​

​If you want to brighten up your playing, you can have LEDs installed in the neck, but what about all that idle space on the body? Sparkfun's Andy England was recently asked to light up one of three custom guitars, and has now modified it to play video animations on the body itself.​

​Since launching in 1999, Lippold Haken's Continuum Fingerboard has helped unlock expressive creativity in musicians around the globe. But a full-sized Continuum is priced way out of reach of many electronic music players, so Haken Audio has launched the ContinuuMini on Kickstarter.​